"speaker 1: My name is Philip Chung.
Currently I'm a, actually a staff researcher here at UCSF but starting in the fall I'll
be a medical student.
My area of research is focused toward developing medical devices that are wireless, low cost,
low power to try and improve patient quality of care and the quality of life and also to
provide these tools to doctors so that they can achieve the same goal.
I'm originally from the Los Angeles area, from a suburb called Arcadia and I grew up
in a household where there were a lot of kind of technical minded people.
So, my other is as software engineer.
My dad is an electrical engineer.
So being in that environment there was always random electronics strewn around on our dining
and coffee table and I just became curious and so that definitely helped shape me and
made me want to pursue a path toward engineering and science.
There was a lot of disability and handicap in my family so my father, during the Chinese
cultural revolution before he immigrated to the United States, he suffered a pretty bad
knee injury.
So he has chronic knee pain.
And that has definitely kind of impacted me on a daily basis.
As a young kid I couldn't fully understand or appreciate why he was always kind of limping
around the place.
When we would go on vacations, me and my brother would kind of run away and then we'd look
back and like hey, why is our dad not able to kind of keep up, keep pace with us.
At one point in my childhood, I distinctly remember and my parents always remind me and
saying that when I grow up I'm going to fix my dad's leg.
While it's kind of silly to think about it now because it's really difficult in reality
to do something like that, it's absolutely impacted me and motivated me to continue down
this pathway.
To just think about what I had envisioned as a child and to see if something like that
could actually happen in real life.
That's one of the things that drives me forward.
When I was an undergraduate in college, I pursued research as something that I would
do as a volunteer basis.
And so that's where I started learning my lab techniques and got really interested in
answering these research questions, answering hypotheses.
I ended up taking a class at my undergraduate in college and in this class we were supposed
to build devices that used some elements from cell experiments that I've done in the past.
And to build a device and then to do something novel with that device that could help enable
better detection of diseases like malaria and so forth.
So that sort of experience and being able to build something with my hands is very gratifying
and that led me toward the direction of doing medical devices rather than doing basic science,
biology or biochemistry type research which I originally was headed down that path.
I think my greatest achievement so far is the project that I'm currently working on
here at Dr. Shuvo Roy's lab at UCSF.
It was actually my master's thesis project so after joining Dr. Roy's lab and working
on this project, we were able to build a few prototypes and then eventually test that device
on a human subject.
And now we've gone far beyond that.
We're actually scaling up to a bigger and bigger clinical study now with this type of
device.
The project is to find a better way to detect preterm birth.
Pregnancy is about 37 weeks give or take but preterm birth is when a baby is born too soon.
And right now doctors, they don't really have the best way of detecting it.
So the device we're building now does something similar in monitoring the cervix like transvaginal
ultrasound but it fundamentally does it in a different way.
So we're using electrical and optical sensors to look at the microscopic properties of the
tissue itself.
I think the future of a lot of medical science really is about interdisciplinary collaboration.
speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that's really cool.
speaker 3: You see that?
There's a small color difference.
speaker 2: Yeah.
speaker 3: This one is whiter.
This one is creamier.
speaker 1: And what I mean by that is you go to a research environment, typically you
have scientists, grad students, post docs.
You go to a medical environment, typically you have medical students, residents, attending
physicians, nurses and the way that each career is taught to think is slightly different.
And I think it's really about bringing those different backgrounds and trainings together.
The different ways of thinking together and to really share them.
Because only by understanding what the needs of the other end are, and how the other half
functions can we really establish a good way to translate laboratory science into the clinic
and then from the clinic, motivate new things to start looking at in
the laboratory."